lifestyle leader

The larger-than-life Willem Buiter (by the way, has any columnist/blogger been elevated higher by their coverage of the financial crisis than Buiter?) wins the award for "Best post title of the week" with his hilarious, and timely, "Please torch my car."

Attacking the "tax incentives for new cars" schemes being adopted in many countries, and more specifically the marketing-as-environmentalism justification for the schemes, he says,

"This artificial shortening of the economic life of a car seems nuts. It’s worse than getting paid to dig holes and fill them again. It’s like being paid to burn down your house to encourage the residential construction industry. In Iceland, where economic calamity has befallen a population that was until the autumn of 2008 among the richest in the world, people torch their SUVs for the insurance money. Iceland doesn’t produce any cars, let alone SUVs, so this does not do their GDP any good, but think of the global externalities! Perhaps the G20 could propose the world-wide legalisation and subsidisation of the willful destruction of consumer durables, residential property and infrastructure (schools, hospitals, prisons etc.) as a global stabilisation policy measure."